Beware Change-Blocking Priors

🫧 Open on Bubbles “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” John Kenneth Galbraith When trying to resist evidence offered for contrarian claims, many invoke the mantra: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Sometimes they just mean to point to Bayes’ Rule, where posterior beliefs are renormalized products of prior beliefs and evidence likelihoods, so that unusually low priors must be countered by u